First, we need to answer the question:

What is version control?

Whenever we work on an important document, we know that we should keep key versions

Version control systems (vcs) are software that handle versioning effectively

Which vcs should I use?

Git

Git is an open source distributed vcs created in 2005 by Linus Torvalds for the versioning of the Linux kernel during its development

In distributed vcs, the full history of projects lives on everybody’s machine—as opposed to being only stored on a central server as was the case with centralized vcs. This allows for offline work and multiple backups

Git also introduced an extremely powerful and light-weight branching system

As a result, Git has dominated the competition since 2011

Nowadays, it is indeed extremely rare to come across any other version control system

How does Git work?

Git saves the history of a project as a series of snapshots:

These snapshots are identified by commits:

Each commit has a unique hash and contains the following metadata:

• Author
• Date and time
• The hash of parent commit(s)
• A descriptive message

As soon as you create the first commit, a pointer called a branch is created and points to that commit

By default, that first branch is called main:

Another pointer (HEAD) points to the branch main

HEAD indicates where we are in the project history

As you create more commits, the history of your project grows and the pointers HEAD and main automatically move to the last commit:

As you create more commits, the history of your project grows and the pointers HEAD and main automatically move to the last commit:

For simplicity, the diagrams can be simplified this way:

One of the many ways this can be useful is that you can revisit old commits by moving HEAD to them:

Another use is to create multiple branches to explore alternative developments:

You can even merge branches:

This is a very brief intro: Git is very powerful